Why Ken's still seeing Red ...

On the kitchen table lies a copy of the London Evening Standard, normally his nemesis but today bringing front page news of the resignation of Boris Johnson’s deputy, Tim Parker. “It’s a heartbreaking headline,” observes Ken without a trace of pity. A few seconds before 1pm he dashes to the radio and turns on The World at One, voicing displeasure that the bulletin fails to mention Boris’s latest set back.

A hundred days out of office and Ken Livingstone remains plugged into the media like an executive from a rolling news channel.

On the kitchen table lies a copy of the London Evening Standard, normally his nemesis but today bringing front page news of the resignation of Boris Johnson’s deputy, Tim Parker. “It’s a heartbreaking headline,” observes Ken without a trace of pity. A few seconds before 1pm he dashes to the radio and turns on The World at One, voicing displeasure that the bulletin fails to mention Boris’s latest set back.

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The phone rings and it is BBC television’s London news programme, another media outletcritical of Livingstone’s former regime, wanting an interview about the Boris situation. “I’ll pop out and do a couple of questions on it for you. All the other journalists have got this number so you might as well use it.” After being in charge of the capital for eight years, significant parts of it spent deflecting the criticisms of his media enemies, Livingstone will this week embark on a journalistic expedition of his own, hosting a new current affairs-based, three-hour weekly show on the London commercial radio station LBC. “I’m going to invite onto the programme everyone who hates me,” he says, nursing a tea mug that carries a photograph of Local Government Secretary Hazel Blears, in her motorbike leathers.

Andrew Gilligan, who was named Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards for his investigations into Livingstone’s stewardship of City Hall, is top of the invitation list. But Livingstone is convinced that the former Today programme reporter would not accept, because he asked him while guest presenting on the same radio network for five days earlier this summer.

“I said ‘I’ll do a deal. First half hour you can ask me anything you want and the second half hour I can ask you anything I want.’

He wouldn’t do it,” says the former mayor. “I would question him about his role in the death of Dr David Kelly. I remember hearinghis controversial piece on the Today programme, it was quite early but my kids had woken up. I heard him mention a senior intelligence source and I immediately thought one of the top ten people in MI6 has grassed up the government. It turns out to be poor old David Kelly. Basically what Gilligan did was what has destroyed so many otherwise good coppers, they’ve caught a criminal but they haven’t got the evidence, so they falsify the evidence. If Gilligan hadn’t distorted what Kelly had said, grossly exaggerated it, Kelly would be alive today.”

Livingstone is convinced that much of the media onslaught against him in the build up to last May’s election was driven by personal animosity. Months before Gilligan’s campaign on City Hall misspending, the reporter doorstepped Livingstone over thedemise of the Routemaster bus.

“I told him to his face, ‘You’ve been responsible for one person’s death, stay away from my family. Get off my doorstep’.” In Ken’s eyes, the media’s motives and its intricate networks are all quite obvious. He says that “the ghastly” Angus Stickler, who reported similar financial mismanagement allegations for the Today programme, had turned against him after the mayor challenged an earlier Stickler report suggesting African boys were being ritually sacrificed in London. “I knew – because I was mayor – that the Met were not investigating this,” he says.

He can withstand criticism, not just because he has a seemingly unshakeable self-confidence but also because he has beenreceiving stick for years. On the kitchen wall is a rather spiteful Private Eye cover from Livingstone’s Greater London Council days, headlined ‘GLC Pantomime Issue’ and carrying a picture of Ken dressed as Dick Whittington with a speech bubble saying “And so farewell to happy days, there’s no more cash for London’s gays.”

He is hoping to prove that the left can do talk radio. “Broadly, it’s a right of centre industry. I know this because I was once a Sony Radio Awards judge and they gave me 24 hours of tapes to listen to. The pattern seemed to be that you got an old journalist and they would do an opening rant about Myra Hindley, too many immigrants, and put all homosexuals on a small island and drop a bomb. Then every bigot in the land would phone in - an absolutely pointless exercise.” Livingstone is surprisingly focused on his Rajar audience figures. “I will be crestfallen if they go down,” says the newt-loving politician. He believes he can find new listeners by targeting the capital’s youth. “London is 10 years younger than the national average. There’s a huge concentration of young people and they’re all having sex. It’s the most fecund place in Britain.”

A fecund father of five himself, he will next day be appearing on CBeebies. “It’s about how to run a campaign about saving water.I’ve got to advise and then judge which team is the best, which I will hate.”

He is also writing his memoirs, which he will finish before offering to a publishing industry that he says was “badly burned by the Prescott and Blunkett autobiographies”, with their small sales.Though Ken seems to sometimes think he is still in power, referringin the present tense to “the way we drive the administration”, he says his main sources of income are now from after dinner speaking and international conferences. “The mayor of Shanghai is flying me out for a conference in November aboutcity economics. I’m doing the keynote speech about what I think the future is for Shanghai. And the government of Hong Kong has got me going out to discuss the environment.”

That should excite the Standard, which reported his trip to the Olympics as guest of the mayor of Beijing as ‘Ken’s £20,000 China Junket’. He can see it coming: “Oh yes, Ken’s junket to Shanghai to have exotic discussions about the growth of international financial centres”. Livingstone talks impressively about the need to strengthen London’s ties with China and India, and not leave the door open for Paris and New York.

But he thinks Johnson missed a great show by not going to the opening ceremony in Beijing. “I just think Boris is mad not to havegone. That opening ceremony, I suspect, was the most extravagant spectacle in human history. It was stunning to watch and I’m glad I went.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly he gives the Standard no credit at all for Johnson’s victory, saying the result was decided by national politics. The voters had worked out what the Standardwas up to. “You’d got headlines saying ‘Suicide Bomb Backer runs Ken’s Campaign’, followed by ‘Ken’s adviser is linked to terror group’, which came as news to him [the adviser] as he had the second highest clearance for MI5 because he is the auditor for the Ministry of Defence. Then they said Boris was the new messiah.People came to the conclusion that it wasn’t balanced reporting,” he says. “Every black person who worked for me was acrook and every Asian was a terrorist was the broad theme.”

The allegations against his advisor Lee Jasper could have been more balanced, given the wealth of material that had been leaked to The Standard and other media outlets. “Somebody inside the building broke into Lee Jasper’s computer and downloaded eight years of letters and emails,” says the former mayor.

Then, surely a City Hall mole must have committed a criminal offence? “How are you going to prove it? By the time we knew there was no chance of finding anyone’s fingerprints. It had most probably happened weeks if not months before the Standard started using it.”

Livingstone writes a monthly Boris-bashing column for News International’s thelondonpaper. “I particularly like the londonpaper because they set out to have a paper that’s positive about London, whereas if the only thing you knew about London was from the Evening Standard you wouldn’t come here for fear of being mugged, raped or ripped off. It’s all doom, like the Daily Mail.” He says that Associated Newspapers (owners of the Standard and the Mail) would be wrong to think he was determined to take away its right to distribute its morning free paper Metro on the tube. “[Lord] Rothermere came to see me and I told him that I aimed to get the maximum amount for it and that if somebody else bids more than you do they’ll get it. I suspect a lot of the venom was because of their paranoid fear that I would try and rig the thing. The reality is that it’s no great shakes to me whether it’s run by Rothermere or [Rupert] Murdoch, neither are going to be particularly progressive. I was going to have an auction on the internet for the rights.”

Livingstone breaks off to observe that the re-letting of the outdoor advertising contract form London Underground, won by Viacom for a reported £100m a year for eight years, had proved surprisingly lucrative. “We got three times what we expected.,We got so much more than we expected that we didn’t need a bus fare increase this year.”

Coverage of politics is “So bad!” across the media. “When I first got really interested in politics in the Sixties all the quality papers had an entire page reporting MP’s speeches. There would be the single salient point that was most important in a speech, in the paper the next morning,” he says. “When the media followed Murdoch down the electronic route we were promised that the savings would mean more extensive foreign coverage and everywhere there is less than there was.”

Instead there are too many columnists. “There are people who never did anything and I’m not terribly interested in their opinions. I don’t want to pick out anybody but Catherine Bennett (of The Observer)would be a good start. Why is anyone interested in her opinions? Has she written great literature, produced great art work, run a major corporation, been elected to office, or is she just paid to produce bile?” he moans. “You might as well pop into the local pub and say ‘What’s your opinion?’ It’s equally valid.”

He seems more enamoured with online political commentary “over the last three months, the only place you could get really good coverage of City Hall was on the blogs” – though he is disappointed by the apparent lack of leftists online, saying “they haven’t got off their backsides and logged on to answer all this [right-wing] drivel”. So Ken will do what he can to even things up in the media. Having given up his own column in TheIndependent after becoming mayor, he is outraged that Johnson presumes to write for the Daily Telegraph while running the capital at the same time. That’s another columnist too many. “It’s a 24-7 job. If Boris had told Londoners what he proposed to do, which was to appoint Tim Parker to do the job I was doing whilst he went back to writing his quarter of a million pound column for the Telegraph he wouldn’t have been elected,” he fumes. “It’s just not acceptable.”

Ken Livingstone will broadcast on LBC 97.3 every Saturday from 10am-1pm

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